o - Aceh Books website

SOUTH AFRICANS 719
terms designed to separate one oppressed group from another in order to control
them.
This inclination to stand together as Muslims produced the first national organization
in 1975, the Islamic Council of South Africa. Based in Durban, it
has 150 affiliated regional bodies. But longstanding historical divisions still
persist. For example, Muslim leaders in the two major centers, Cape Town and
Durban, are engaged in a power struggle.
It was to the Cape of Good Hope that Islam first came in the seventeenth
century. Muslims were introduced as slaves and political exiles by the Dutch,
who first settled there in 1652. The latter required cheap labor to build up the
new settlement of Cape Town and to work the surrounding farmland and, finding
the indigenous Khoikhoia difficult to control, brought slaves in from Batavia
(now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
The political exiles were prisoners of war who had led insurrections against
the Dutch in the East Indies. Best known is Shaikh Yusuf (son-in-law of the
Sultan of Bantam), who came to the Cape in 1694 with a retinue of 49 kinsmen
and servants. He became an ancestral figurehead for succeeding generations of
Muslims. His grave became one of several shrines which form an arc around
Cape Town and commemorate the lives of seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury
Muslim leaders.
The Muslims of the Cape became known as Malays or Cape Malays because
Malay (together with Dutch) was their lingua franca. The use of Malay, however,
gradually died out except for a few words and expressions retained in presentday
Afrikaans conversation. It is now widely, but erroneously, believed that
these Muslims came from Malay or that, because they were sent from Batavia
(the Dutch administrative center in the East), they were all Indonesian. The firstgeneration
Muslims were a more heterogeneous body of people mainly from
India, several Indonesian islands and Madagascar, with a few from Ceylon and
other areas on the Indian Ocean. In South Africa they became more heterogeneous
through exogamous marriage.
The community was held together by a common faith and set of social practices.
The community was Sunni, mostly of the Shafi school. A few became
Hanafi during the nineteenth century as a result of the influence of Abu Bakr
Effendi, a mufti sent to Cape Town from the Ottoman Empire to give guidance
on Islamic doctrine. His book, Bayan al-din, was one of the first books ever
published in the Afrikaans language and is the more remarkable because it is
printed in Arabic transliteration.
The "Malay" Muslims live in close, if somewhat uneasy, contact with the
"Coloured" Christians. There was a tendency for Christian Coloured women
to marry Muslims and "turn Malay" (convert to Islam). This was to their
advantage as the Muslims enjoyed a greater degree of economic independence,
hiring out their own labor as hawkers of fruit and vegetables, fishermen and fish
hawkers and as skilled craftsmen, than the Christians, who were more directly
dependent on Whites for employment. There was also a greater degree of mutual